This reminded me that I haven't gotten around to swapping out the other 4gb card for the 16gb card, which will bring me to 32......because since I haven't been trying to get multiple connected soft body simulations to work without being ridiculously unstable, I really haven't needed the extra ram.

And then I read the last couple of sentences and laugh, remembering being a hacker kid in the early eighties.

So where's the 6,250 choice (640K -> 4G)? The 12,500 choice? The 25,000 choice (640K -> 16G)? But, I see we have a few dinosaurs out there on the list who actually had Z80s! Thanks for making me feel young again!

But maybe the questions should have used ranges or a greater than/ less than qualifier?

Come on, this is supposed to be a Geek site! Be precise and pedantic for God's sake. Or at least for Quantum's sake.

oddly enough, I have more of a need for RAM in my phone than my desktop.

But if you want a good laugh, flex your google-fu and compare your phone's memory and processing capacity to that of NASA's Mission Control center when we launched Apollo 11. -- Not the lunar lander (that is outclassed by modern parking meters), I mean the Mission Control mainframe back on earth.

That really drives home how crazy the whole "moon by the end of the 60's" thing was; and how amazing the success truly was.

Well, I think this illustrates that computing power is not that crucial of a factor in moon missions. There have been many technological advances in the years, but FLOPS clearly isn't what makes going to the moon hard.

"...everything else also should have advanced at a similar rate." False premise. Different technologies advance at different rates, largely driven by demand and profit motive.

Intel is not a government agency with a confused budget, mission and goals that change with each election. Intel always knows that it exists to make money. It expects to do it by continuously offering more function at reduced cost to a broader set of expanding markets. NASA is a government agency whose customers are the few politicians that control their budget.

There's hope. NASA is steadily releasing its space monopoly yet, seeding the world with expert space knowledge while contributing to demand for space services. It's necessary for the economic development of space. It will evolve into a pure science and regulatory agency by dropping routine launch-services, exploration missions and placing more emphasis on X-Prize competitions and developing regulations promoting and governing private-sector access to space. Expect rapid space-tech engineering (engineering, not science) and commercial development by investor-financed space companies focused on communications, transportation logistics, mining. At a more mature market stage, expect competition to drive steady Intel-like advances, creating new markets and techniques for space logistics companies. (Air-launch, elevator delivery from Earth, ballistic shipments of space commodities to logistics outposts in deep space) Expect deliveries of space-hydrocarbons, financed by specific futures contracts traded on the stock market.

Has engine power increased by 1 000 000 times over the past 30 years? No. Because the fuel energy density, maximum practical thrust and maximum safe payload are bound by the fundamental laws of physics. The challenges of reaching escape velocity have not changed much.

CPUs still have some way to go until they become entirely bound by physics.

Because "everything else also should have advanced at a similar rate" is absurd nonsense.

Moore's Law is not a fundamental principle of physics that applies to every phenomenon in the universe. The human lifespan doesn't double every 24 months, crop production doesn't double every 24 months, the speed of light doesn't double every 24 months, etc. It was an extrapolation that applies to a particular phase in the development of a particular technology. Not to interplanetary propulsion.

Do they mean the first one I owned, or the first one I controlled (at work)?
If it's the first one I owned, then I'm only at the 10,000+ level. I had a PC-clone with 640KB, now I have two laptops with 16GB each, or 25,000 times as much, one at home and the other at work.
If it's the first one I controlled, then I'm at the 1,000,000+ level. It was a PDP-8 with 4K of 12-bit words (=6KB), so the current stuff is 2,600,000 times as much.

My first was a Commodore 64, current machine has 4GB of RAM. I rounded to the nearest answer. Maybe the poll should have been expressed in powers of 2? I'm at 2^16 for instance. Might make it hard on all of those people who started out with 640kb machines though.

The 16K cartridge was a standard extra piece on the ZX-81 system, along with your tape cassette recorder and your TV. People assumed if you didn't have the 16K cartridge, you must be a little kid or an initial customer still getting a good feedback from the keyboard. (Or a later customer, wanting to feel the keyboard feedback from his raw device again.) The cartridges were so standard that anyone with 1K or a third party 32K or 64K RAM pack was beset with incompatibility issues.

Exactness would require too many options, you'd need 2^7, personally I'd need 2^18 and another comment here was 2^24 - all 25 from 2^0 and maybe beyond would be right for some. I think there's a limit of seven-eight poll options, so you'd have to do approximations anyway. I went with 100000, too bad I didn't go for an 8x8GB X79 board or I could have picked the real dinosaur option.

It doesn't even say "greater than", and the chance of having an exact decimal multiple of your original computer is pretty slim. The whole thing is half-arsed, but it wouldn't be a Slashdot poll if it were competent. I'm not complaining, moaning about the options is part of the fun.

Where's the, "I'm old and I've forgotten" option? My first computer (mine as in, I was the only one who used it) had a 512MB HD. RAM? No idea. My second computer probably had between 128MB and 256MB of RAM (I guess, based on the time period). My third computer started with 512MB of RAM, and a tiny 40GB HD. Both got upgraded. My current computer has a tiny 512GB HD, but will be upgraded soon enough. RAM is a ridiculously large 16GB. I don't think I've ever used more than 5GB since I bought the thing. The Sys

Haha. There are multiple responses to that:1) I didn't get my first computer until I was already 'old', and I'm now even older. (Replace 'old' with 'middle-aged' as preferred.) 1a) Perhaps because I just didn't realize how important they would become.
1b) Or I couldn't afford one.
1c) Or I lived in a place where they just weren't available (see also 1b, but realize that in some parts of the world didn't get TV until the 1980s, and some parts of the world still don't have access to over-

If your first computer had a hard drive (and one with half a gig), you're DEFINITELY not old.

Indeed... I remember salivating over a tape drive, but I couldn't afford it. At least what I had was better than my father's first computer -- it took up an entire research building and used punch cards. A separate building pumped out the vacuum tubes to replace the failed ones during the daily service window. Unfortunately, this meant that you couldn't run a job that took longer than 20 hours, but instead had to batch your operations into chunks so that you could take the output from one session, analyz

Sounds plausible. Probably 4MB, along with the crappy 486 processor (1992 or 1993 vintage I guess).The computer before that (not mine), had something like 4MB HD. Crazy times. The computer before that (not mine) had two floppy discs, and no HD.

And to think I can still play Sopwith (1985 version) on my current laptop. Though if I want to do that I need to work out how to slow down DOSBox.

"A few crumbs" of memory on the HP. You could access and modify it with light switches on the front panel. So you could mess with the time-sharing BASIC on it, and replace the save with the scratch command, for when the teacher went on it.

32Gig on the SchtinkPad. I'm not going to fish through all that memory.

Mine came out to about 7 * log10(64kb/16gb) ~ 37, so it works without the +10. but I'm counting since my family's apple IIe at age 8. Still, fine work, sir!

I think to improve precision, the constant adder should probably be adjusted by the age difference between one's oldest sibling and also take into account relative prosperity of your childhood family. Maybe throw in something to reflect parents' occupations. But by then it starts looking like the IEEE salary curve-fit model, which IIRC had about eleventy-thousand variables.

See a comment further up the page.
Someone may not have got a computer until the 1990's but may already have been 50 when they did.

I guess I should have included the disclaimer that my formula -- like Slashdot polls, horoscopes and psychic readings -- is for entertainment purposes only. One should not use their computed age for purposes such as registering for Social Security, Medicare or the Draft. Consult your birth certificate for these purposes.

On a slightly more serious note, if one's childhood ended before the era of the home computer, the assumptions I made are not valid, and the age estimate will be even more inaccurate than it

Wasn't it actually 256 Bytes on-board. The 16/32KB was from the expansion brick plugged into the side. That's how our parents enforced time limitations on our video games. If it was getting too hot, you had played enough for one day.

My recollection is that the base model TI 99/4A had 16KB built in, but it was actually video memory. The CPU had none, or only a small amount (256 bytes sounds about right). To run software stored in the video memory the CPU had to continually make requests to the video chip to transfer data from the video memory.

The memory expansion modules that plugged into the side of the console connected to the CPU's memory bus. I heard that BASIC programs and other software ran a lot faster if you had a memory e

First computer was a Franklin ACE 1200 with 64k. My PC at home has 16GB so about 250,000 times as much memory. they could have ranges instead of static values, like 10 to 100 times 100 to 1000 times etc.

The first computer that I bought was a Charles River Data Systems 68/35F with 512 kB RAM and a 1 MB add in board. The first ones I used were via punched cards taken by my CS teacher from my high school to the college - one run per day! I don't have any idea how much memory was available on that system. You learned how to program when you just got one run per day.

Current systems run roughly 5,000 to 10,000 times the CRDS but it served the basic functions I needed. All the fluff added later just makes it ni

I picked 1000x because the first computer I owned had 2 mb (Unix PC/7300, a real kick-ass machine for 1987). But the first computer I used was a PDP-8 with a few K. It wasn't "mine", though - personal computers were still pretty rare in the late 70's.

Before I owned a "personal computer" per se, I started with a Nintendo Entertainment System with 2 KiB of work RAM and 2 KiB of video memory. My current Windows 7 PC came with 4 GiB of RAM. And now I use the latter to develop software [pineight.com] for the former [infiniteneslives.com].

I still don't know what ever came over me about 15 years ago when my wife asked if she could donate it to goodwill and I agreed... I had a couple of 1541s, a tape drive, crappy MPS801 printer, a 1702 monitor, and hunders of floppies with games of all kinds - even a few legal ones!;)

Then (1995): An awful Compaq Presario CDS522. 4 MB RAM. 66 MHz Intel 486SX2 (that's right... no floating point unit). 270 MB HDD. 14" built-in monitor of questionable quality... I was so happy I finally got a computer. But the happiness quickly faded away as I began to realize how bad the computer was. Upgraded the memory over a year later with 16 MB to a whopping total of 20 MB but the system still sucked overall. I had to cope with it for two years until I managed to replace it with a newer computer.

My first computer was a TI-99/4A with 256 Bytes (yes, bytes) of RAM. So even with a moderate 8GB in my current computer, I still have 33.5 million times as much memory. Dammit, now I really wanna play Hunt the Wumpus.

Does the Atari VCS (Video Computer System) count as my first computer? Because my 32GB desktop today would make that "computer's" 128 bytes of RAM look tiny. We'd need a "268,435,456 times as much" category for that comparison.

I remember at the computer store, the IBM PC had just come out and they had one on demo. My dad loved IBM from his job, but the sales person recommended the Apple ][ because the PC had almost no software. The other alternative was the Apple III, but my dad said the Apple III was "too much computer." So my (Dad's) first computer was an Apple//e with 64k of RAM and two 5 1/4 Floppies. He bought it solely to run Visicalc and to do word processing. I had lots of fun copying and playing cracked games, and saved

So I am not the only one who started with the//e. I collected aluminum cans to save up for the joystick. My mom still think that was the best computer ever as all you had to do was put the right disk in to run what you wanted.

My first modern computer, and the first one I purchased myself (a 75 MHz Pentium; used), had 8 MB RAM, though I installed another 16 before I even booted it the first time. I am currently sitting at my work laptop, which has 8 GB. So, that math is easy.

As a kid, I had a Tomy Tutor, which, according to Wikipedia, was similar to a TI-99/4A, which had 256 bytes of RAM -- one-quarter of a kilobyte. So 8GB, times 1024 MB per GB, times 1024 kB per MB, divided by one-quarter, equals... about 32 million times more?

The first computer I "used" was my dad's 486. The first computer I really remember using is the school's Apple ][s.

The first computer I owned was an old-even-at-the-time Thinkpad, with a Mobile Pentium and (IIRC) 64MB of memory. That's the one I'm counting as "my first computer", which gives me a mere 192x improvement. Had I counted from the 486 or Apple ][, it would have increased to 100,000.

I had a similar one, but now that you mention it, I'm not sure how much it had. I know the video card had a graphics mode that could handle 16 colors in a higher resolution graphics modes, as opposed to most pc's that had only 4 colors and "palettes" at the time. Could they do HIMEM stuff, or am I confusing that with my first 386?

I recall my parents' 1000SX had 640KB. That was the first computer I truly "used." I don't remember my dad's Altairs. The Tandy was good for word processing (Wordstar), flight simulators (MS, Their Finest Hour), turn-based strategy games (The Ancient Art of War), programming (GW-BASIC) and much else. What a great computer. The 1993 upgrade to a 486 DX2/66 was more drastic than any upgrade since.

Both my work desktop and home desktop have 8GB, so that makes it a 13,107.2:1 ratio for me, so I voted 10,000